Portfolio of Wouter Sluis.

Creativity and aesthetics.

for this expertise area, my development started really early. When I started the study sketching classes immediately boosted my creativity. In these classes I learned basic sketching skills, that I could implement through P1. In P1 therefore I sketched a lot and made a few sketches of the product that we had to make in that first project. I really tried to implement my vision in this design, which was all about fun and innovation in the first semester. After a while, my vision shifted a bit. I laid more of a nuance on function. This is something that I find really important in products as well, and something that I keep in mind now when I’m designing. I still try to make a few sketches now and then to improve my skill, and in these you can see that functionality took more of an important role in how I perceive design. For the future, I want to explore my vision more through sketching and create more daring aesthetics.

Technology and realization.

In technology and realization, we had to develop quite a lot this quartile. Because of creative electronics and the last challenge of creative programming, we were challenged to work with Arduino. I already had some experience with this, but not enough to be confident in working on Brian. I really had to look at what was possible and how we were going to achieve this. The creative electronics classes really helped and gave me a clear view of what was possible and necessary to create something interesting with an Arduino. We are working on this right now, and outside of working with Arduino, we are also experimenting with different prototyping materials. Think of 3d printing and laser cutting.  For the next few projects, I want to be able to implement my knowledge of Arduino more and to be able to work with more advanced prototyping materials like using laser cut MDF and 3d printing as well.

User and society.

User and society has been an important expertise area. In the first quartile we of course had the course that was all about user centered design, but I found that I constantly try to implement little parts of this expertise area in my work. I found that definitely during creative electronics, I implemented a bit of this expertise area in my work, mostly the use of feedback to the user while they are using your product. Through this work, I can conclude that user centered design has become something that is really important in my vision on design. Functionality and usability of a product are both things that I almost think of every time that I work on a project.

Math, data and computing.

In math, data and computing I have also experienced quite some development through this year. The courses foundations of data analytics, calculus and physics for engineers can be linked to this expertise area. I also had a run in with this expertise area during my creative programming challenges. In here, I used different mathematical functions to get an aesthetically pleasing outcome. I had to go back to my core mathematic skills to get a good result. In the future I plan to find more opportunities in my projects to work with big databases and various statistics.

Business and entrepreneurship.

In this year’s projects and courses, I didn’t really focus on business and entrepreneurship that much. Although, I did have some extracurricular activities that I can link to business and entrepreneurship. I am in a committee at lucid called conduct. This committee organizes a festival each year, and this year I helped organizing it. I mainly worked on the business part of the festival: hiring other companies, working on the brand of conduct and helping run the organization in general. This can also be linked to my professional skills and is a really big learning experience for me.